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As staff battle to shed the Christmas flab, businessleaders are also facing pressure to go on a diet. Mark Whitby, senior vice-president at US storage solutions company , has urged bosses to tighten their corporate belts with a 'Data Diet" to rid organisations of excessive baggage before the day, currently predicted for 2016, when experts believe global storage capacity will start to be outstripped by demand.

Whitby believes the much-vaunted "Big Data" doesn't hold much value for business at the moment, since analytics is still in its infancy. On the contrary, he says businesses are holding far too much data and facing problems as the world uses up data storage and approaches a potential data capacity gap.

"Most companies’ hard drives are littered with non-essential data; everything from old email archives and attachments to personal staff photos and videos," he says. "Managing this data flood is no easy task but it will pay dividends in the near future as storage becomes a more expensive, rationed resource."

Big Data

Big Data is a modern corporate obsession and Seagate wants it to develop further, rebranding itself at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with a "living logo" that aims to showcase data as a living entity that powers human invention, culture and advances.

So how do chief executives and other organisational leaders ensure that their systems are not instead clogged with "dead data" that adds no value but clogs up their information capacity? Should they have a "data amnesty" in which staff are encouraged to cleanse their computers of useless spreadsheets, photographs or data-heavy graphics?

Do bosses need to reduce the personal data limits of staff or introduce even more draconian methods of incentivising them to de-clutter their in-boxes and system files? Whitby suggests the following five-step plan. And with tongue only slightly in cheek, I have given each a name hewn from conventional dietary wisdom.

The S-Plan

Stop taking storage for granted. If storage is not already part of your planning for 2015 then it should be. Ensure your IT team is preparing to educate your workforce about the need for smarter thinking about what data is kept and why. Help them understand that this is not a draconian move to make their lives harder, but a business-critical issue that needs immediate attention.

Waste-Watchers

Work with your chief information officer and IT team to agree a data policy that outlines what kind of data can and can’t be stored on hard drives and exactly what employees can and can’t save to the network. Such policies can be easily enforced with existing technology, both at the network and storage levels. Quotas can be set for each user, forcing them to think harder about what they really need to save.